Hi LW,
I got interested in rationality from the books Irrationality, some others I can’t remember in between and later, fast and slow. Somehow I found HPMOR, which I loved, and through that, found this. Other influences have included growing up with quite strongly religious parents (first win for the power of the question—but why do you believe that, first loss for thinking that because something was obvious to me I could snap my fingers and make it obvious to others.)
What I’m doing: I’m in my twenties, working in the energy sector because I started following global warming and resource shortages when I was 16, thought it was an important area and decided to go work in that. The things I have learnt from an engineering degree, a bit more life, and LW, mean that I don’t necessarily still believe it is THE area of importance, but as an area, I’m happy enough in it for now. My job basically involves lots of programming, modelling and data handling anyway so that is fun! I get to encounter my biases in the work environment occassionally/ regularly as I have to try and work out how much confidence to have in the data available and in my various theories. For my job at least, I do find attempting to debiase useful at a day to day level, if not as useful as being a significantly better programmer would be.
So far on less wrong I have read about half the sequences, of which the most resonant for me was the one on cached thoughts. Whilst simple, this drew together a bunch of other points learnt, and which felt really clearly, like how I think. I’m reading the sequences from a link on here that I’ve put on my kindle. This is pretty good, but I don’t know how much shorter the A-Z version is. I do skip occasional bits. I feel that a little graph of the sequences, similar to the very simple one on http://hyperphysics.phy-astr.gsu.edu/hbase/hframe.html would help newbies negotiate through.
Anyway, I’m continuing enjoying to read posts on here, but hope to start contributing by: a) Continuing to try and help others to learn (at least the basics) of this stuff b) Maybe setting up a meetup in Bristol, UK. c) Posting some thoughts up to the hive mind if and when I have some worth sharing
Ah but think about an actual (habit) problem you have had and see how many courses of action you can think of. In my experience many of them will help, and so trying in order of probability is a great way to find what might help. The just try it method pivots you from a moaning/accepting of problems attitude to: I can solve this, I just don’t know how. But I know how I (probably) can find out how.
Of course it is difficult to be objective enough to identify real trends...